At a much anticipated Monday night meeting, the New Bedford City Council delayed its vote on whether to approve a business improvement district proposed in the city’s downtown.
Instead, the council reversed a previous decision to accept the application paperwork and reopened legal questions about whether the proposal has enough support from downtown property owners to even qualify for a vote.
The proposal aims to create a business improvement district, also known as a BID, that charges downtown property owners a mandatory fee to fund projects meant to benefit the businesses there. It has also ignited a fiery debate over the future of downtown New Bedford, a hip neighborhood in a working-class seaport where many residents fear a wave of gentrification has already begun to displace longtime residents and small businesses.
Critics of the BID claim its mandatory fees would further increase the neighborhood’s rents, and that any beautification projects and advertising campaigns would primarily benefit a class of investors looking to profit off the neighborhood’s turning fortunes. Supporters, meanwhile, say the BID would bring more foot traffic downtown and uplift the independent restaurants and retail businesses that are already there.
On Monday night, the council instructed its attorney to re-examine whether a signed petition seeking to establish the downtown BID met the requirements laid out under Massachusetts law.
The main questions are whether the petition really has signatures from 60% of the property owners within the BID’s boundaries; and whether these supporters own at least 51% of the district’s assessed property value.
At a previous meeting on April 10, a majority of councilors found the BID met those thresholds. But several councilors said on Monday night that new information has since come to light, which prompted them to reverse their decision.
“We’ve been hearing from the community. We’ve been re-discussing the issue among legal counsel to see whether in fact it was done appropriately,” Council President Linda Morad said in an interview after the meeting. “It’s brand new to us. It’s brand new in this area, and we’re going to make sure it was done correct before we move forward.”
The legal question
The petition claims to carry the support of 62% of property owners within the business improvement district, putting it just over the legal threshold Massachusetts law requires for a BID proposal to be presented for municipal approval.
But critics like Rose Miller, an accountant and commercial property owner with three buildings within the proposed BID, said the petition only manages to hit that threshold by illegally “gerrymandering” the district to cut out as many opponents as possible.
The firm that prepared the petition, New City America, excluded many small property owners whose buildings lie within the BID’s boundaries from its calculations. New City America said it did not count these small property owners because the BID proposal exempts them from owing mandatory fees. City councilors want clarity on whether this method for determining BID membership and calculating support complies with state law.
Miller and other critics say small property owners were cut out of the district because most of them oppose the BID, and New City America itself acknowledges small property owners “were uniformly opposed to the mandated assessment” as recently as 2015. In its final calculation, New City America found that 34 of the 53 property owners it counted support the BID. Miller said at least 56 small property owners were excluded from the count.
“It didn’t pass muster the way they did it,” Miller said, “and I think they were hoping no one would notice.”
A lead supporter of the BID, Marco Li Mandri, acknowledged in an interview that the BID’s shape “might look like a piece of Swiss cheese,” but insisted that the proposal complied with state law.
The law itself, Chapter 40O, states that a BID must be “a contiguous geographic area with clearly defined boundaries.”
Miller and her husband, Frederick Miller, presented their concerns in a letter to the City Council that was entered into the public record at Monday night’s meeting.
“I think they knew we had a pretty firm legal footing here and would pursue this if they were to blindly approve this thing,” Rose Miller said.
Next steps
Morad said the council’s attorney, David Gerwatowski, will check again whether the calculations used in the BID proposal comply with state law. She said city officials may also seek legal advice from the Massachusetts Attorney General.
“We are questioning whether the way they did their calculation to come to their percentages was done correctly per the law,” Morad said.
After considering any legal opinions it receives, the council will then vote on whether the petition meets the thresholds for support required under Chapter 40O. The next meeting concerning the BID was scheduled for July 22.
If the petition survives that legal test, the councilors would then open a debate over whether to actually establish the BID. Ward 6 Councilor Ryan Pereira said if the matter comes to a vote, his colleagues still seem split on the policy merits of the proposed BID.
“This is one where I can tell you I think it’s going to be a tight vote,” Pereira said, “I just don’t know which way it’s going to go.”
